![]() The second half of The Oriental Obscene explores the “kung fu craze” in America between 19, and analyzes a variety of films including Billy Jack (1971) and The Street Fighter (1974), as well as the television series Kung Fu (1972), to reveal the fantasy of mastery of body through kung fu, an orientalized mode of violence. In both cases, white American veterans dehumanized and emasculated by war and suffering from psychic trauma identify themselves with the violence, suffering, and defeat of the Vietnamese body. For example, during the 1967 Spring Mobilization to End the War, black antiwar activists who were part of the Harlem contingent carried placards reading “No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger,” “They Are Our Brothers Whom We Fight,” and “Black Men Should Fight White Racism, Not Vietnamese Freedom Fighters.” In chapters 2 and 3, Chong analyzes the infamous photographs, “Saigon Execution,” “Napalm Girl,” and those from the My Lai massacre, and demonstrates how historical narratives of these images reappeared in Hollywood films in the late 1970s about the Vietnam War, like The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979). The violent imagery and memories of 1968 linked black and white Americans to the Vietnamese “other.” Black antiwar protestors and veterans related their antiracist struggles to that of the Vietnamese and VietCong. that exceed the actual social relations between racialized subjects,” was the oriental obscene that imagined “the American body politic in relation to the Asian body” and also revealed new possibilities for cross-racial identification (pp. between different racial subject positions. The type of racial phantasm, or the “imagined relations. Chong contends that within these violent memories a new racial phantasm emerged. and Robert Kennedy, black urban riots in the 1960s, and white and black antiwar protests. National memory of 1968 included imagery of violence in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. In her analysis, Sylvia Shin Huey Chong highlights what she calls the oriental obscene, or how the oriental body is racialized through violence, and draws on psychoanalytic and film theory to elucidate the imagined relations between different racialized subjects in visual representations of the war and its veterans.Ĭhong argues that 1968 serves as the historical and representational origin of Vietnam era visual culture. The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era investigates a broad range of Vietnam War visual representations including photographs, television news, fictional films, and documentaries. The visual experience of witnessing the shocking imagery of death and violence on television made the Vietnam War the “living-room war,” leaving deep imprints on the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans. Scholars and journalists have long debated the influence of visual media in both the outcome and memory of the Vietnam War. Visualizing the Vietnam War: Race and the Orientalized Body
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